setting design

Revisiting the Venerable Borderlands

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I like the Keep on the Borderlands. It’s a self-contained ecology of adventure gaming, good for new players to learn systems and substantial enough for experienced players to turn the knobs and pull the levers of the home base. Rules as written, the locations are diverse enough to give contrast, but not so broad that the location feels like a grab bag rather than a cohesive whole.

(I’m talking about B2 here, not the new boxed set, with which I have no experience.)

Back cover illustration from the Keep on the Borderlands by Erol Otus depicting a small group of adventurers approaching a castle on an outcropping at sunset or sunrise.

The region has a variety of calls to action, especially in the adventure category. The Caves of Chaos are perhaps the most recognizable feature and largest location, but other sites abound. The weird hermit can be played for menace, horror, or even comedy. The bandit camps make for a good law-vs.-chaos conflict, but can also add depth as an alternative “town” when the adventurers want to unload sketchy loot or hire retainers who might deliberately not have attachments to the settlement. The Cave of the Unknown provides GMs a chance to add their own unique location, and invites speculation as to its nature — why has no one nearby found this? Why is the forested area around it cleared of tress in the immediate proximity?

The titular keep is a compelling home base as well. Since it’s “on the Borderlands,” there’s a sense that the player characters have to rely on themselves and the other local residents, rather than depending on “authorities” to whom they can offload their problems. The keep is the last redoubt out here in the borderlands. The keep needs support.

The keep can also be a great cauldron of intrigue. The keep can be turned to the characters’ aims, should they be able to play its politics well. The Castellan has a purpose, but player characters can guide that purpose or they can run afoul of frontier law. It’s all emergent gameplay, and gives context to what the characters do. (And if the player characters don’t care about the politics of the keep, they miss out on nothing; there’s nothing wrong with the keep as a simple fallback and restock base for traditional adventure-exploration gameplay.)

With a bit of fiat, improv, or dice rolls, the various characters there can become an ensemble of motivators, antagonists, foils, and friends. While it definitely requires the GM to flex some creative muscle, the residents of the keep need not be defined by their jobs. Rather, looking at the keep’s facilities shows what resources the keep has to offer (and by comparison to what’s absent, what it can’t offer, and must be done without or quested-for). The people providing those goods and services have ample room to become fully fledged characters, or can remain stock individuals where useful.

Topics for Redevelopment

When I gamemaster, I run almost nothing “out of the box.” Like, I believe, most gamemasters, I like to tinker and kitbash a little bit to give specific context to the particular group of players with whom I’m playing. This makes every session or campaign feel unique and opens up avenues for player expression. If the adventurers want to redeem or punish the scurrilous cleric at the keep, I can emphasize those particular encounters. If they want to develop an unspoken quid pro quo with one of the Castellan’s advisors, I can shine more light there. If they decide to throw in with the more unsavory elements, or even work as proxies for the bandits outside the keep, that’s doable, too.

What I don’t personally enjoy is the idea of the adventuring party being a bunch of racially motivated smash-and-grabbers. Given both a desire for extra context and adopting a more compelling narrative reason for dealing with the Caves of Chaos than “go kill those Other people over there,” I lean more into a certain set of literary influences to reshape the experience when I run Keep on the Borderlands.

Adding Phantasmagoria, Dread, and Wonder

I make no secret of my preference for my fantasy gaming to have a tinge of the literary Gothic. Not (necessarily) to be all highfaluting and, well, literary, but because it comes with a set of aesthetics and themes that I think match well with lurid tales of the imagination. I don’t much enjoy “stock” fantasy; I like when there’s a sense of wonder and fear and enchantment that comes from exploring the edges of imagination. Thematically, I like inflecting my games with the strangeness of the unknown, superstition, morality, and the sublime. Imagine the adventurer standing on the precipice, almost subsumed by the full magnitude of the world’s truths!

Bringing that to The Keep on the Borderlands is a rewarding exercise in world-planning and game-running. Holding the horror of the Caves of Chaos at bay becomes a question of self-preservation, the intrusion of the terrible and the profane and fantastical.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich (1818). The hiker stands as a back figure in the center of the composition. He looks down on an almost impenetrable sea of fog in the midst of a rocky landscape - a metaphor for life as an ominous journey into the unknown.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich (1818)

The Castle of Otranto on the Borderlands

I borrow heavily from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto when I run the Keep on the Borderlands. Sometimes I even call the keep itself “Otranto.” The pervasive sense of medievalism in Walpole’s book meshes well with medieval-themed roleplaying games, and some games’ mechanics (like Shadowdark‘s light-source scarcity rules or the danger-tinged magic of Outcast Silver Raiders) make for a good fit with those themes and aesthetics, making them experiential.

Specifics I lift:

  • An enormous helmet has ominously fallen from the skies. This is a key element of The Castle of Otranto and it’s a great add to the keep. It creates a call to action to have someone trapped down there in perdition, whom the players’ characters can seek to aid, and it also gives an excuse to justify the revelation of a dungeon area beneath the keep proper (which can be as big or as small as necessary, based on the players’ interest). That means there’s a dungeon you don’t even have to leave town to explore, and you’re probably the first group of adventurers to do it.
  • The Castellan is Manfred. Well, not Manfred proper, because Manfred’s a full-tilt jerk and there’s a not a lot of room to want to interact with him, but a descendant of Manfred, Castellan Manfredi. This also lets me lean into the familial guilt and horror aspect of the literary Gothic. If left to his or her own devices, Castellan Manfredi will surely reap some sort of familial doom, but if the players want to involve themselves with it, they can perhaps help terminate the family curse, or otherwise find themselves embroiled in the congenital saga.
  • Paintings, portraits, and other inanimate objects that move or seem to move, giving the impression that the keep or some force within it is aware of the players’ characters and keeping an eye on them.

The Goblin Curse

Going back to the idea of elevating the characters from being racist thugs, I like to back away from the whole idea of having the occupants of the Caves of Chaos exist in terms of “race,” legacy, lineage, whatever. The useful aspect of having a site-based adventure locale is the call to action to explore that site and face its conflicts. What I want to set aside is the idea that they’re a “culpable people” or other sort of benighted “race” that must be cleansed. Man, even typing that is gross.

I’ve run the Keep on the Borderlands in the past with more esoteric thematics. Once, using Pathfinder, I reworked the Caves of Chaos to be the malfunctioning remains of a sort of multiplanar machine, and replaced the goblins with akatas and the other creatures with other “void” aberrations, making the place a site of cosmic horrors from beyond and their incursion into the game world. I’ve similarly used modrons when running Keep on the Borderlands in D&D, and made the Caves of Chaos a site of demonic infestation (which, honestly, felt more like Diablo than I wanted the experience to be).

I think my current favorite, though, is reworking what it is to be a goblin or other monster, as opposed to just replacing the monster types.

As handled in Mörk Borg, goblins occur when an existing goblin attacks a character: If the attacking goblin survives the encounter, the character attacked (whether or not the attack hits) turns into a goblin themselves. This is excellent — it creates an urgency for players to pursue goblins at risk to themselves, pulling them deeper into whatever’s going on.  In some cases, you even have individuals bringing the goblin curse upon themselves, as a result of deranged cults or perilous rituals. It also frees the group from having to deal with things like “Do we murder all the combat-participant creatures and leave the children to be starving orphans in the caves?” I like this framing of monsters as baleful manifestations rather than inherently villainous peoples. Monsters are monsters because they’ve chosen to be monsters or otherwise run afoul of a monstrous world.

So what is the goblin curse? In all honesty, I think this is one of the mysteries best left unsolved. It makes the world scary. But that doesn’t mean the people in the world don’t have their own theories, and strange occultists surely try to turn the observable details of the curse to their own ends, making for some weird rituals — et voila, context for the “chaos temple” in the depths of the Caves of Chaos region, and possible origins for some of the other denizens of the deeps.

The Gothic Pedigree of Vampire

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I thought of being forced to witness the unnatural revels of a diabolical feast, of seeing the rotting flesh distributed, of drinking the dead corrupted blood, of hearing the anthems of fiends howled in insult, on that awful verge where life and eternity mingle, of hearing the hallelujahs of the choir, echoed even through the vaults, where demons were yelling the black mass of their infernal Sabbath.

— Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

Over the past several months, I had been exchanging social media drive-bys with John Garrad, who has been doing some academic work on the representation of the gothic in games. He shared some slides of his work in progress on Twitter, which I thought was interesting, so we talked a little further, and he agreed to let me share some of the contents of that conversation.

 

Gothic-Punk: do you see it as an evolution of a wider, long-term Gothic tradition, or a product of the 1990s cultural circumstances, or as a collection of what the developers over time have deemed relevant to the project, or… something else that I haven’t thought of?

Part of Vampire’s longevity, in either Masquerade or Requiem formats, is that the gothic trappings it affects are tied to an emotion rather than an era. Vampire wouldn’t have survived long if it was quintessentially 80s or 90s. (You can see a parallel evolution here in technology, in that V20, released in 2011, doesn’t bother to account for the prevalence of smartphones or of wide-scale surveillance, either of which would pose massive Masquerade threats. We just handwaved them away.)

While the early material deliberately attached itself to a specific subculture, social scene, and music expression, it slowly pulled itself away from those over the progression of developers, with the intent of opening itself up to a greater breadth of players. Even through that extrication of itself from a defined “scene,” it kept the literary component of the gothic movement throughout because, again, those transcend decade. I don’t know if it’s still out there, but I recall one of my style guides that hammered on the point “gothic, not goth.”

The big one on this front: how do you feel VtM goes about making its Gothic credentials concrete and real to players? I’m particularly interested in mechanics here — which aspects of the game create a Gothic ‘feel’ when people are sat down playing.

The big three for me:

Game Structure: The game was built in literary “units of play,” as opposed to the traditional RPG structures derived from wargames. We still had turns, just because they were atomic, but Vampire intended to wean storytellers away from tactical encounters and frame things more dramatically (whether literary or stage) in terms of things like scenes, chapters, and overall chronicles. The overarching story container was not a “campaign,” with its military-conquest connotations, but a chronicle, a record, a retelling of events that happened. And in so doing, it relied very heavily on unreliable narrators, so you were never sure you were getting a clinical accounting of events as much as you were getting a definitely biased perspective of events, unless you were there, and even if you were, you’re not unbiased yourself.

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Cultural Touchpoints: Vampire heavily invoked western, Abrahamic traditions, akin to the gothic movement’s reliance on religious and feudal motifs to carry its themes of superstition and relative primitivism. It leaned on straight-up gothic notions of madness and romance (themselves not very progressive…) and gave systems for them in terms of things like Humanity, Derangements (sometimes incurable…), and maintaining distance in relationships. The classic image of vampire lovers feeding from each other is actually a peril in Vampire because it can create a blood bond, which has all of the outward appearances of love, but strips away the (religious alert!) Free Will of the lover to exercise choice when it comes to the beloved. All of this is great stuff and immediately transgressible for players who have felt marginalized, in whatever context or extent, by traditional societal expectations, and provides mechanics by which one can express that transgression.

In more than one case, Vampire had intended to “open things up,” but when it showed rather than told, those showings became the default rather than a single expression. For example, the Caine myth was intended originally to be a myth, but it quickly became the predominant myth (IMO because it was so relatable, and because it gave a religious structure that players could rebel against and be rewarded for so doing. Instead of degenerate priests and corrupt churches, Vampire makes the religious institution part of the origin story and encourages players to break from their obedient relationship to it.) The Prince and Primogen structure in Gary and Chicago were originally intended to be a political situation, but over time they became the political default. (Again, IMO, I think this is at least partially because it provides an example that storytellers can depart from as they will, as opposed to having to define their home chronicle whole cloth — which Requiem demanded.)

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Supernatural Prevalance: This is obvious, but Vampire: The Masquerade wouldn’t have taken off if it was simply GOTH: THE VENDETTA. Giving players access to abilities beyond mortal ken isn’t just a game design call to action, it puts the tools of gothic literature into their hands. They’re the ones able to drop the helmet on Manfred’s son, they’re the ones able to call forth the children of the night, they’re the ones able to shroud men’s minds. And the framing isn’t “with great power comes great responsibility,” it’s “you are the monster,” and it expects some concomitant moral failure and abuse of those otherworldly powers in pursuit of selfish goals (which can themselves be regretted or indulged, back to the system above). Without powers, Vampire could have been Mad Men, with bitchy people doing awful but mundane things to one another. Instead, it’s a passion play on a deliberately lurid stage with an infinite special effects budget that flirts with the forbidden when engaged.

Did you strive for a different kind of Gothic with Revised? (I’ve been fascinated by the ST Vault submission guidelines, which really make plain the differences between the editions that I’ve always felt were there but never really articulated — and I wondered if any of the Revised development fed into the game’s genre positioning.)

I don’t know if it was a deliberate striving for a specific kind of gothic so much as it was an evolution. It became its own thing, with definite gothic influence, and true to itself. For my own part, I think this is a maturing and finding one’s own voice over the course of developing and writing the amount of books I did. I remember one of my earliest writing projects for school, which might as well have been a Lovecraft manuscript with a hasty find-and-replace, absolutely a pastiche, and early in Vampire, I was similarly attempting to copy influences. Over time, I thought it definitely took on its own voice, its own life. You can easily pick up a Vampire book and identify its gothic parentage, but on a more substantial reading and use, especially for the Revised and V20 material, you find that Vampire is consistent largely with Vampire, while still acknowledging and even revering the movement that helped it get there.

And finally: V5 aligns the Gothic-Punk with prior editions. I wondered if you had any insight about why that point was made, and if V5 is consciously trying to distance itself from something in the tradition?

On this one, I don’t feel qualified to render an opinion. By conscious choice, I haven’t been a part of V5, primarily because, as they’ve wanted to create a new envisioning of the game, I didn’t want to encumber that with assumptions that I carry, having developed and written for it for two decades. It’s others’ exercise to determine whether V5’s vision is an evolution for Vampire or simply another perspective on it, and whether that’s for better or worse, but none of my input is there. A different creative vision requires a different expression.

Despatch

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In late May of 1984, a night-mist rolled inland to Somerset, leaving in its wake a horror.

Few noticed immediately. Those who did, though, acted swiftly. Within hours, a small boat troop of SAS agents performed an insertion mission to Somerset, but only two returned. They were unable to make a final report, and could only rave about some sort of cannibal bloodlust. Aerial surveillance of Somerset revealed innumerable motionless bodies lying all about the city of Bath and surrounding landscape, many of which had been stripped of flesh.

brixton

Field research revealed that a blood-borne “entity” was to blame. Those “infected” became ravening monsters, losing all sense of self and self-preservation and seeking only to kill and feed on… human flesh.

The Prime Minister passed the Special Citizens’ Act in an emergency session of Parliament. This measure gave Special Branch the authority to detain — or liquidate — any citizens suspected of having a connection to the disaster. Paranoia spread as quickly as the tragedy, and hastily built detainment facilities teemed with thousands of prisoners across the country. Special Branch arrested anyone and everyone, victims of the horror and suspected conspirators alike.

It wasn’t enough. The horror spread too quickly. The detainment camps collapsed. Terrified people rioted, looted, and destroyed places suspected of being havens for the infected. The cities, towns, and countryside were a ruin.

toxteth_rioter

The World Health Organization and the United Nations quarantined the entirety of the United Kingdom. International forces established three camps, one in Liverpool, one at Aberdeen, and one in London, where they could evacuate those who proved to be untainted by theentity. A broadcast transmission implores survivors to seek the quarantine camps if they can make the trip.

You are one of those survivors, still clinging to life two weeks after the disaster. You and a few other individuals have convened in the basement of a block of council homes in Birmingham. The closest camp is Liverpool, just under a hundred miles away to the northwest. It’s by far too dangerous a trip to make by oneself, especially since it’s unknown what obstacles lie between here and there, but with the safety of numbers, it just may be possible.

Shift on the Fly

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Orc-5e

Gruumsh rarely has someone else’s interests in mind.

Saturday’s session went well. It was a fairly standard rout-the-baddies scenario, with an extra layer of justice on top, as the head baddie had purloined a valuable piece of party treasure a few sessions before. Said baddie then holed up in a mountain stronghold with some surly flunkies. But the party was having none of it, and took it upon themselves to right the wrong.

This session concluded a chapter of the campaign, which I had planned beforehand. As a special reward, I had intended to offer the party its choice from a few benefits, to help frame their accomplishments in the terms of the campaign. You know how it goes — rewards are good and endogenous rewards are best. A little reskinning of some backgrounds shaped up as the following options:

Book One Conclusion: Marks of Prestige

Marque of Jandamere: As the bearer of a Marque of Jandamere, you inspire people to think the best of you. You are welcome in high society, and people assume you have the right to be wherever you are. The common folk make every effort to accommodate you and avoid your displeasure, and other people of high birth treat you as a member of the same social sphere. You can secure an audience with a local noble if you need to.

An Eye for the Land: Having liaised with the original folk of the region, you have earned an excellent intuition for the land, and you can always recall the general layout of terrain, settlements, and other features around you. In addition, you can find food and fresh water for yourself and up to five other people each day, provided that the land offers berries, small game, water, and so forth.

Prince-Bishop’s Sigil: You receive shelter and succor from members of the Church Militant and those who are sympathetic to their aims. You can gain aid from temples and other religious communities in the Prince-Bishop’s service. This help comes in the form of shelter and meals, and healing when appropriate, as well as occasionally risky assistance, such as a band of monks rallying to your side in a fight, or the residents of a cloister helping to hide you when you are being hunted unjustly.

(The middle one is struck through because the players never got around to meeting that faction. But the remaining two still offered a choice, and you can see that they’re all modeled on the backgrounds system.)

Responding to Feedback

As good players do, however, they threw a subtle but excellent monkeywrench into my plans. As they were scourging the mountain stronghold, one of the players casually commented that not only were they getting their treasure back, they were going to get the whole damned mountain fortress as well.

Touchdown!

So at the end of the session, I tossed that into the mix. The players could have one of the previous benefits, or, hell yeah, they could have the stronghold. It would be (at least initially) a non-revenue-generating territory, but it would be a “home base” nonetheless and one that they could develop to reflect their ownership.

Belogradchik_fortress_2009

Welcome home!

What that meant for me was that I needed to rework how I would present the ongoing campaign. Previously, it had been constructed as a political thriller, in which the players’ characters moved as agents of influence from location to location in pursuit of artifacts and evidence. A secret faction of rebel nobility had been active, and the players had exposed them, making for the “blow up the Death Star” arc of chapter one. All very cool and satisfying, but now, with the players having a home base, I’ll have to retool much of the campaign and bring relevant events to the players, instead of moving the players to the events. I’ll have to change some of the events proper, too, but that’s fine, because overall, I get a lot out of the deal (assuming they choose to take ownership of the stronghold as their reward).

  • I get to keep reusing the same map. My group is geographically scattered and plays via roll20, so getting more use out of the same virtual tabletop map helps me control my production costs. Maybe I’m secretly a producer at heart….
  • A “home base” creates relatedness, as it gives the players a place in the world they can genuinely call their own.
  • It’s a location that can create rewards but also conflicts. That is, it should generate some ongoing benefits and positive relationships, but those relationships can also inspire new things for players to do and problems to solve.
  • It remains tied to the politics of the region, so the main campaign themes and antagonists remain intact. I have to adjust how the players come in contact with them, but none of the planning needs to be discarded.

But most importantly

  • It was a player suggestion, and a really good one, so the players are even more invested in the progress of the campaign.

So that’s the case for improvising and a willingness to change campaign direction based on player input. We’ll see how it shapes up from here.

Campaign Hacking: Tomb of Annihilation

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Some posho’s flunky comes up to you and offers to strand you in a malarial jungle swamp, in which you must busk for enough money to outfit yourself for an expedition into a death-god’s lair and smash an artifact so the posho can have her hit points back. When you’re done, abase yourself before the merchant prince’s manor where she’s staying to let her know she’s good to go home.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an unfair summary of the framing device used to kickoff Tomb of Annihilation — but it’s not too far off course. For the record, I really like a lot of what ToA has to offer in terms of gameplay, but some of its setting assumptions rub me the wrong way. I’m planning to run it, but not stock out-of-the-book.

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It’s no secret that I love exploration campaigns.

When preparing a new campaign, perhaps the most important ingredient is the call to action. Your “elevator pitch” to the players should suggest to them exactly the sorts of adventures they’ll be having, and they’ll imagine characters they can project into that expectation of action. Everything in your preparations should point back to that question: How will the campaign use this detail?

Luckily, I recently ran across this tweet, which prodded me in the right direction, I think, for a game more in keeping with my tastes, and also that empowers the players more than making them thralls to a fantasy one-percenter.

Yes. Excellent. Flip the assumption.

With that principle in mind, I bashed together the campaign notes below. So how, then, can I frame the events of Tomb of Annihilation so that they can be used in the context of a reverse-grave-robber premise?

Anti-Imperialists

The PCs are members of a sociopolitical faction known as the Reclamationists. They can be native Chultans with an interest in protecting their own destiny, or they can come from abroad, acting against exploitative interests seeking colonial dominance of the jungle. The PCs are rebels, a resistance faction, heeding a moral mandate.

(GM Notes: I actually probably won’t set this in Chult, as I’m more attracted to other campaign worlds, but I leave it untouched here for the sake of clarity.)

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Playable characters. Okay, maybe this is a still from Black Panther. You get the point.

Beliefs

  • An ecological interrelationship exists between humans and nature, acknowledging the inherent connections between people and their surroundings.
    • “True freedom lies where folk receive nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth.”
  • Economic value derived from land (including natural resources and natural opportunities) belongs equally to all members of society.
  • Cultures and communities make sovereign decisions for themselves, and outside influence intrudes upon that sovereignty.

(GM Notes: This is swiped almost whole cloth from the Wikipedia entry for the Diggers, which seemed like a good conceptual fit.)

History

The most commonly accepted origin of the Reclamationists is the unification of a druidic circle and a locality of tenant farmers. With the spiritual guidance of the druids, the land-workers rallied to a common cause, giving rise to the faction’s motto, “All who believe are together and have all things in common.” Reclamationism spread among numerous land-working classes, and various offshoots of it exist, from deity-aligned dominionists to secular humanists and everything in between. It is a form of agrarian populism and often finds antagonism from traditional feudalists, across numerous nations.

(GM Notes: This section is pretty weak. It needs more supportive, actionable detail. It does, however, indicate some potential conflict, whether internal to the Reclamationists or from external entities trying to hinder opposition.)

Objectives

  • Occupy! Reclaim public lands that have been privatized.
    • Dig them over, pull down hedges, fill in ditches, etc. to plant crops.
  • Return any items of cultural significance to the cultures that claim them, if such cultures are still extant
  • Ensure that any items taken for academic purposes are taken by reputable academics — none of this “sell it to a museum or private collector” nonsense
  • Harry the efforts of factions seeking to exploit the resources of Chult
    • Ex.: The Merchant Princes are speculators intending to profit from colonial interests plundering the resources of Chult
    • Ex.: The Flaming Fist at Fort Beluarian is a rent-seeking organization extracting revenues from those who would themselves explore and exploit the lost regions of the jungle
    • Ex.: The Order of the Gauntlet may have some admirable aims in opposing the undead, but it may have more imperialistic aims, and cannot be completely trusted until any other objectives have been discerned.
  • Act in opposition to those entities that extend their influence at the expense of others

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Expect a great many undead foes. Undead are an inarguable call to action.

Opportunities for Action

  • Smash colonials, especially where they conflict with indigenous communities
  • Expand knowledge of indigenous entities
  • Recover items of cultural significance from those who would exploit that cultural significance for private gain
  • Explore the unknown

(GM Notes: Note the strong verbs in these last two sections, the calls to action. Most of them stand on their own, but some could use some touch-up. “Ensure,” “act,” and “return” can probably be replaced with more robust actions that are more engaging on their own.)

Branching the Flow Lines, Pt. I

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“Getting into the dungeon” is usually a straightforward affair, and one without a huge amount of significance. It’s often glossed over; on occasion it’s used as a change to spring a tone-setting trap on unwary players or to deliver an ominous expositional portent. Moving through a dungeon is often similarly linear, offering a few more choices, but modern design by and large drives players through a series of escalating challenges to an ultimate “boss fight” or consummating set-piece conflict.

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Movement into and through contained physical spaces can be so much more than this, however. One of my favorite classic modules, Caverns of Thracia, provided numerous avenues of approach from the surface into the dungeon environment itself, as well as from within it to the lower levels. The eponymous Castle Ravenloft consists of a variety of branching hallways and catacombs. In general, when you branch the movement opportunities of a physical space, the emphasis of the game session becomes one of volitional exploration over overt conquest. Finding how and why to move where takes precedence over how to overcome what. (Which isn’t to suggest removing fights or other encounters, it just shifts the emphasis.)

Constructing location-based adventures with multiple choices and multiple points of ingress offers a host of satisfying decisions to players, and are equally as fulfilling to GM while watching the deliberations ensue.

  • Players can pursue an immediate short-term goal of discovering all the points of entry to the location
  • Players can choose their approach to the environment so as to best suit the party composition and strategy
  • Players can “shortcut” to deeper levels when they’re ready to undertake those challenges without retreading already cleared ares — unless a clever GM wants to repopulate the cleared areas to offer additional challenges and rewards

As you can see this provides a wealth of significant decisions for the players to make during gameplay, and it provides them numerous opportunities for action. Stuff like this is why people play games to begin with as opposed to consuming more sttaic media: to see the outcomes of what they do.

Practical Application

Dungeons in fantasy games are the most immediately obvious example.

The original Succubus Club for Vampire was set up with an “open floor plan” that allowed players to move through it and claim micro-territory in this most prestigious of Kindred hangouts, and even included a basement “labyrinth” for clubgoers who deliberately wanted to lose themselves in its environs.

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Bars, dance floors, VIP booths, cocktail tables, the DJ booth, the coatroom, etc. can all be locations in a modern “dungeon,” with numerous ways to approach them.

Multiple choices can also capitalize on the themes of fear present in horror games, whether being lost in the caverns where a cult of Deep Ones worships in Call of Cthulhu or searching for your beloved in the mall’s service tunnels and boiler rooms in Monsterhearts.

Games like Spycraft, Night’s Black Agents, and Leverage can have “dungeon crawls” through environments like corporate skyscrapers, fallout shelters, derelict churches, apartment high-rises, and warehouse complexes.

Mazy spacecraft, military outposts, and planetary strongholds can translate the experience into games like Star Wars, Stars Without Number, and Starfinder.

And of course, post-holocaust games can adapt any of these locations and more, whether as leftovers from collapsed civilizations to new constructions erected by dangerous mutants or reavers.

While Designing…

The following techniques can help you design game spaces that offer a great deal of autonomy.

Make use of vertical space: Level one can have a staircase that goes down to level two, a sinkhole that connects level one to level two from a different room, an airshaft that leads directly to level four, and an elevator that stops at all levels. Giving players options for not only their route but their destination affords them the opportunity to challenge themselves and set their own goals. Used wisely, you will get a lot of mileage out of this design principle. In computer games, level design is a entire discipline, making extensive use of this technique. (And it’s no coincidence that Caverns of Thracia‘s original author, Jennell Jacquays, is an accomplished level designer for computer games.)

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A cross-section of vertical space arrangement in Swords & Wizardry

Favor authenticity over realism: You can enter and exit the monster’s pit by being dropped through the trap door in the throne room floor… but also through the tight, twisty tunnels the vermin in the kitchen have burrowed. Who cares if the vermin don’t actually burrow and that it doesn’t make sense that the kitchen is next to the monster pit? What’s important are the choices and the thematic consistency, and to suggest that someone else down there has an interest in smuggling food to the pit monster….

Staged complexity: Not everything has to be available to the players immediately. Oftentimes, players will enjoy a chance to revisit a known, “mastered” portion of the location that poses new challenges. Over the course of the players’ exploration of the site, open additional options to them. Pulling a lever on level three opens an additional entrance to an unexplored section of level one. A room on the surface that’s initially inaccessible can be unlocked with the password offered by an NPC encountered in a lower level.  An entire floor can rotate, changing the layout of a “known” location and granting access to previously unknown areas. With weird magic or superscience, entire portions may even vanish or be revealed “when the stars are right” or other criteria are satisfied. Thus the additional options open to players once they’ve already been introduced to the location, so they’re not overwhelmed by it.

GM Quickies: GMing Horror

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When you take it upon yourself to GM a horror game, it’s your job to build a moody experience. If you’ve run a game as a GM before, you know that building mood is a significant task! You share the storytelling stage with the players, and by and large, they react to the game elements you’ve told them are present. With that in mind, knowing how and what you want to present the players with goes a long way toward maintaining the mood appropriate to a horror session or campaign. The following suggestions aim to help you do that.

Create Fear, Don’t Squick

Fear is an emotion that comes as a result of the uncertainty of one’s own well being. Characters in a horror game are right to feel fear — some dark force has turned its baleful eye directly upon them!

Every good GM knows to add sensory detail to their descriptions, the better to immerse the players in the setting. Gory detail should be used sparingly, however. Gory detail more often creates revulsion, not fear, and risks replacing the thrill of fear with discomfort. Resist the urge to devote too much attention to the glisten of viscera or what’s dripping from a ghoul’s mouth. While certain parties may appreciate this sort of thing (and, of course, you know your gaming group better than anyone who’s never met them could), be wary of risking their enjoyment of the game by placing too much emphasis on splatter in place of building a mounting mood of horror.

Detail is like a spice. Too much overwhelms the dish. A little goes a long way.

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Let Imagination Loom

Fear thrives in environments where the mind is left to imagine its ultimate doom. The monster unseen is more fearsome than the monster described. The creaking door, the guttering candle, the faraway howl on the moor: All of these create more fear than revealing what caused them. Ultimately, many questions will be answered and many mysteries will be revealed over the course of a session or campaign, but leaving some time between describing some element of the story and revealing its true nature is the crucible in which horror forms.

This technique works well for everything from small details on up to greater campaign mysteries. Revealing partial information to the players sets their minds to imagining all sorts of worst-case scenarios that help reinforce the mood at the table. Pacing the rate at which you reveal information can trade much on that principle. Introducing strange and incomplete details and allowing the players to ascribe dreadful significance to them lets the players brood upon the unknown. It’s a technique used in mystery stories as well, but it takes on a fearsome gravity when matched with other elements of horror.

Example Details

Minor details: The creaking door, the guttering candle, the faraway howl on the moor, as mentioned above. Footsteps on the ground floor of the inn (who could be visiting at this time of night?)

Story details: A bloody knife discovered in the refectory. Flashes of light witnessed at the castle on the crag from the village below. The missing servants at the tycoon’s mansion.

Campaign details: The construction of the new crypt on the family estate (because the old crypt filled so quickly…). Learning that the librarian is the seventh son of a seventh son. The brewery is owned by the son of the secret police, and every delivery has an extra barrel unaccounted for on the shipping manifest.

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Discovery Through Repetition

Delivering game descriptions with emphatic repetition indicates to players that the repeated detail is important. The repetition reinforces the presence and normalcy of the detail. It creates a pattern that stands out when it’s broken (which allows you to amplify the dread by the players not knowing what has caused the break in the pattern). It creates a subtle signal that makes players feel empowered when they discover.

The chilly castle has a fire stoked in every room that feebly keeps the cold at bay. The perfect array of bricks in the Boston cellar walls indicates attentive craftsmanship. Every envoy sent by the ambassador has blond hair. When the players explore one of the castle rooms with only smoking embers in the fireplace (who or what put it out?), observes a cellar wall with a single missing brick (what’s behind it?), or receives an envoy from the ambassador who is strikingly bald (why is this fellow different?), their minds work to analyze the the change in the pattern. And this lets their imagination loom, as above.

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Steal Their Ideas

A clever GM knows when to rely on the purchased or pre-annotated source material, and when to run with the players’ cues. Packaged stories are commercial products, and are generally written to entertain the broadest audiences. Notes written by the GM before the session starts are, at best, projections of concepts that will challenge and entertain the players. But when your session is underway, you’re getting live, real-time feedback for the game events that you can use immediately so that you can tailor further developments to that player response. If your notes say the Duke is secretly the werewolf, but your players have a more significant connection to the midwife, maybe it’s best to change the werewolf’s identity. If the vital clue is in the publisher’s office but the players are having more fun at the mayor’s inaugural ball, consider relocating the vital clue to city hall.

Be careful with this! Ultimately horror revolves around the perception of helplessness. But if players feel that every time they develop an attachment to a character or show an interest in a setting element, the GM turns it against them, they will feel punished for their engagement. Horror relies on hope to contrast the darkness with light, and a sense of accomplishment is critical to maintain even in a horror environment.

Destination: Pagan Lands

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I’ve been “working on” the Pagan Lands for years. By “working on,” I mean that I’ve been wrestling with my ideas for what to actually do with it. It was originally my home campaign, but then I got a wild hair to retool it as a retroclone, and then I set that aside to do it as a setting-agnostic pick-up supplement, then it returned to stasis as my Belluna and Tarsemine games became active, but it has always remained vital as a work-in-progress labor of love, and it’ll probably be the next extended campaign I run.

While I was straightening the home office this weekend, I went through my notes folders and found myself doodling in the rough regional map that’s grown over the course of the project. The map is intentionally ugly (the better to make quick changes without invalidating a bunch of art) and I’m not a gifted cartographer anyway, but it serves its purpose as a sort of geographical flowchart by which the players can move from one cluster of encounters to another.

Each of these regions represents a different opportunity for action, the “what is happening here?” in which players can involve themselves  — or to leave unmolested if it doesn’t suit their tastes. Think of these regions somewhat like the Ravenloft domains or the territories of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, a themed experience that the players’ choices can directly affect. Most importantly, knowing a region’s theme doesn’t rule out events can occur there, it only suggests the sorts of events the players are most likely to encounter. As with one of the core Magic precepts, if the theme isn’t accessible and discernible from the most common interactions with it, it won’t emerge as a theme.

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Naturally, a separate collection of random encounters also helps to populate the Pagan Lands. Not every event that transpires in a given region needs to touch upon that region’s theme or central event. Most do, however: Each wandering encounter table consists of events or creatures that could easily have connections to the theme. Demihumans encountered in the dead city are probably there plundering the linnorm’s hoard. Pilgrims encountered near Vulcan’s Cliffs are likely deranged cultists of the Sea God. Encounters near the Starfall have probably been exposed to the celestial body’s residual energies.

So it looks like I’ll be headed back into the Pagan Lands soon, and I’m looking forward to it. Although it’s a weird place, it’s like coming home.